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Kurt Cobain’s Sweet, Sweet Ax

By Wm. Ferguson September 8, 2011 5:07 pmSeptember 8, 2011 5:07 pm

Charles PetersonKurt Cobain, at a “Nevermind” record-release show at Beehive Records, in Seattle, Sept. 16, 1991.

Is it appalling, or is it perfectly logical that Fender Guitars is manufacturing a limited-edition Kurt Cobain Jaguar? The sunburst Jaguar is an exact replica of the original that Cobain used on ‘‘Nevermind,’’ from its nonstandard humbucker pickups to the glamorous scar on the back, where Kurt’s belt buckle wore away the finish. It retails for $1,849, and I think it’s axiomatic that if you can afford it, you’re not the next Kurt Cobain.

I don’t recall any interviews where Cobain talked about his guitars — Nirvana were avowedly not gearheads. But I do know that in the early ’90s, if you were a guitarist on a budget, Telecasters, Stratocasters and Les Pauls were way out of your league. Jaguars and Mustangs — standard-issue instrumentation of the lowly surf band — were deeply uncool back then. And therefore, crucially, they were cheap. Which would lessen the pain, I guess, of smashing a guitar at the end of a set once in a while.

Once Nirvana became multiplatinum superstars, Fender offered to make a guitar to Cobain’s exact specifications. It was an ungainly hybrid of the Jaguar and the Mustang — the JagStang. Apparently, Cobain kept sending the prototype back to Fender to be tweaked. He had a finished version of the guitar on the European tour the band did around the time ‘‘In Utero’’ was out, but he rarely played it. Whether he felt funny wielding the product of corporate sponsorship, or whether the guitar had lousy action, we’ll never know.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…